Celebrity verite

In April, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and photographer Steven Klein drove from Los Angeles to Palm Springs to snap a few pictures for W magazine.

Leading up to the shoot, Pitt had approached Klein, a top fashion photographer, with the idea of an artistic collaboration. “Brad wanted to explore the notion of the perfect couple at home,” Klein said. “It was all about examining this facade -- and looking at the cracks.”

The resulting 58-page fashion spread of Jolie and Pitt dancing and drinking, fighting and fumbling between the sheets -- in short, behaving like a married couple in punch-drunk love -- landed in the magazine’s July issue. Photos of the actors looking like an idealized version of a 1960s nuclear family -- complete with five little boys who look like miniature versions of Pitt -- were reprinted in the tabloid press, aired on morning talk shows and downloaded endlessly from the Internet. Intentionally or not, they became the branded images of Pitt and Jolie’s often-rumored but never quite confirmed off-camera romance.

An edited selection of the photos, titled “Domestic Bliss,” is being shown at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills through Aug. 27. Depending on the beholder, the images exist either as art or as testament to the refined celebrity image-crafting that helped propel Jolie and Pitt’s action-comedy, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” to a $50-million opening weekend in June (just days after W, the women’s fashion magazine, hit the newsstands).

The photos are also emblematic of the latest trend in celebrity portraiture.

No longer content to appear in photos wearing fancy clothes in glamorous locations, and increasingly leery of overexposure in the 24-hour celebrity news cycle, famous people want to act out scripted dramas in promotional stills -- just as they would before movie cameras.

“It wasn’t a photography shoot. It wasn’t a celebrity shoot,” Klein said. “We looked at it like a small, independent film, an investigation into the breakdown of a family.”

Vince Aletti, a photography critic for the New Yorker who also curated a mini-retrospective of Klein’s photos at the Musee De L’Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2002, said that he wasn’t sure if the photos’ narrative arc was make-believe when he first saw “Domestic Bliss.”

“It was a set-up thing, but when I saw the magazine, I had to stop and think, ‘Is this real?’ ” he said. “There was something very convincing about the fiction.”

Klein, who previously photographed Pitt looking alternately bloodied and disheveled for a 30-page W spread tethered to the release of “Fight Club” in 1999, insisted “Domestic Bliss” was not deliberately orchestrated to confirm the public’s perceptions of the stars.

He said Pitt and Jolie remained “in character” through most of the two-day shoot, while the photographer orchestrated their performance in the manner of John Cassavetes, a pioneer of cinema verite.

“Placing the characters and placing the action was enough,” Klein said. “It’s a Cassavetes thing: The action unfolds in itself.”

W’s creative director, Dennis Freedman, allowed Pitt an unusual quality-control measure: He let the actor co-edit “Domestic Bliss” with Klein.

“It’s ironic how the photographs became a representation about [Pitt and Jolie’s] personal lives,” Freedman said. “It was never intended to be that.”

Aletti credits the photographer with being highly attuned to the pop culture zeitgeist and being able to capture a certain look or attitude just as it gains traction: “Klein is really good at picking up on some hunger for whatever crazy imagining that we have about celebrity.”

Toward that end, Klein helped rehabilitate Justin Timberlake’s image with a 2002 Arena Homme magazine cover. Looking distinctly unlike the boy-band front man he had been up until that time, the singer appears beaten up, dirty and bleeding at the gums. In 2003, Klein collaborated with Madonna on “X-STaTIC PRO=Cess” -- a 44-page W spread that turned into a multimedia video and sculpture installation at New York’s Deitch Projects gallery: Madonna appeared in sexually suggestive yoga poses against a variety of gritty backgrounds, augmented by computer-generated imagery.

“Steven has a very particular thread that runs through his work,” Freedman said. “He tends to find the underbelly in everyday life -- the strange, dark side to people’s behavior, personalities, everyday actions.”

Now based in New York, Klein had trained as a painter at the Rhode Island School of Design before getting his big break shooting Dior cosmetics campaigns while living in Paris in the mid-1980s.

With his unassuming air and ability to go for more than a minute without blinking his Windex blue eyes, the photographer is quietly intense. Yet it’s easy to see how his confident manner allows some of the most telegenic stars in the world to feel at ease in front of his shutter.

Klein is careful to lavish praise on his collaborators on “Domestic Bliss.”

“When I work with Brad, he is strictly about the work and the image-making and he becomes the subject -- not the Iconic Brad Pitt,” Klein said. “And Angelina really got the idea of what we were doing and stayed in character. She took it very seriously.”

Klein declines to offer any insight on whether Brad and Angelina are -- or aren’t -- a couple.

Perhaps equally telling, however, is the way he chooses to characterize his goals in photography.

“My intention isn’t to seek the abnormal, weird or brutal,” he said. “Picture taking to me is grabbing moments -- like stealing candy from the candy store. You want to get away with it.”